Fundamentalist Campaign

It is a very dangerous thing happening: over 5,000 Facebook (FB) accounts have been activated in Assam in the past few weeks with a clandestine motive. According to state Chief Minister Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma, certain fundamentalist elements are pulling the strings from a not-so-friendly neighbouring country like Pakistan, apart from Bangladesh, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and even Australia. As the Chief Minister said on Friday, these FB accounts have been activated recently with a singular focus on Assam, showing no engagements on issues concerning the rest of India. What is also alarming is that on scrutiny of these FB accounts, it has come to light that fake Hindu names and addresses, including that of IIT Guwahati, have been used. On the surface it looks like something is brewing ahead of the Assam Assembly elections scheduled to take place in April-May next year. But there is every reason to scrutinise them through the lens of national security. The latter has been already established by the fact that a narrative has been sought to be created through the FB campaign that Assam will either be “independent” or “captured” if one cuts the chicken neck. Going by this, one can surmise without any doubt that this new campaign is part of the “unfinished agenda” of a demographic invasion of Assam by the Muslim League, whose conspiracy to include the region through the notorious Grouping Plan of the British on the eve of India attaining independence was scuttled by the visionary Gopinath Bardoloi with the blessings of Mahatma Gandhi and Syama Prasad Mukherji. It’s important to remember Nehru and Maulana Azad had almost given Assam away to Jinnah by accepting the Grouping Plan and exerting pressure on Bardoloi to agree to it. It will probably not be out of place to suspect a connection between this new FB campaign and the anti-Assam campaigns which were run by certain groups during the anti-CAA movement, as well as to the so-called “Miya poetry” campaign. One must always remember that the demography of Assam till 1905 or so was not like what it is today. It was the 1905 Partition of Bengal and clubbing Assam with Eastern Bengal, the birth of the Muslim League in Dhaka in 1906, an engineered migration of “land-hungry Muslim peasants” from Eastern Bengal to Assam, and the grossly unpatriotic stand of Md Sadullah which have all contributed towards the dangerous change in the state’s demography in the last one hundred years.